


broken toys and tin soldiers

by saltandlimes



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Brotherly Angst, Established Relationship, Hallucinations, Kissing, M/M, Missing Scene, So much angst, Sort of happy ending, Thanos is an asshole, The Avengers (2012) Compliant, references to off screen torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-19 22:09:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14246769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltandlimes/pseuds/saltandlimes
Summary: Trapped on a dying planet at the "mercy" of Thanos's servants, Loki survives by remembering one thing. Somewhere out there, Thor is looking for him. Thor is coming to save him.Only, Thor never does, and when Loki gets to Earth he realizes his brother never even tried.





	broken toys and tin soldiers

**Author's Note:**

> An anon sent me this wonderful prompt on tumblr:
>
>> Can you go back in time to when Thanos is torturing Loki after he lets go of the bifrost and have him hallucinating/dreaming Thor?
> 
> I wrote a ficlet ([Ornament](http://saltandlimes.tumblr.com/post/172568786296/omg-thorki-promts-i-was-gonna-send-a-thorki-for)) but then I found I had to keep going and expanded it into this fic. 

Loki wakes up slowly. His back aches, and his magic hasn’t yet managed to knit his broken arm back together. The ground is hot when he levers himself up with his good arm, so hot that he whimpers as fresh blisters break out on his bare skin. He wishes he could spare enough energy to protect his hand from the scorching rock, but it’s all he can do to keep the rest of his skin cool while also letting his arm repair itself.  
It’s an effort to pry his eyelids apart. When Loki manages to get them open, all he sees is a landscape of blasted, tortured rock, and the faint lights of the stars far above him. The sun is just rising, sitting on the horizon as a distant ball of angry red, its body swollen by its death throes. It hardly warms the little planet, a small blessing even as its gravitation rips it slowly to shreds. 

Loki leans sideways to drink from the trickle of sulfurous water that runs down the cliff face behind him. It fills his mouth slowly. He tries not to waste a single drop, though, licking his lips clean when he has drunk as much as he can stomach. 

When he’s finished drinking, Loki slumps back against the cliff, pulling his knees up to his chest. For a moment, he is all alone, with nothing to do, and nothing to focus on other than the ache in his arm and the way his whole body cries out for aid. 

“You’re looking well, brother,” Thor’s voice comes from nearby. 

Loki opens eyes that have slipped shut again to find Thor looming in front of him, his broad shoulders blocking out some of the stars and his hair gleaming red in the morning light. 

“Why do you come to torment me again?” Loki asks. It’s pointless, he knows, arguing with his own mind like this, but this apparition is the only companion he has out here until _they_ return. 

“Come now. I compliment you, and this is how you treat me?” Thor crouches in front of Loki, prodding at the bruise on one of Loki’s knees. “I should take back my words.”

“We both know I look terrible,” Loki manages a dry laugh, even though the sound tears at his throat. “Were I at home, you would send me to my chambers in disgrace.”

Thor stops poking at Loki’s bruise-mottled skin, instead coming to sit next to him. “You still look beautiful to me.”

“False flatterer, as always,” Loki retorts. Then, all of an instant, he can take this no longer. He squeezes his eyes together to stop tears from falling - he cannot waste their precious water. Even as he does so, though, he passes a hand over his face, removing the small glamour he keeps up to keep his captors from knowing how close he is to breaking. “Look at me now, brother,” he whispers.

“Loki…” Thor breathes. 

“What good am I now, big brother? I’m not a warrior, I’m not a friend, I’m not even Aesir. Just a jewel to adorn King Thor’s throne, and what good is a broken ornament?”

“It matters not to me. It never did.”

Loki’s laugh is dry again, and it fades away into a hacking cough that leaves him bent over his knees, gasping for air. When he finally gets his breath back, he looks up at the Thor-shadow in exhaustion.

“You lie,” he hisses.

“How can I lie, Loki? I only say the things you yourself know to be true.” Thor was never this logical in their life together, Loki is certain of it.

“You think I have never lied to myself,” he fires back. “You think I have never tricked the trickster. You _lie_ , Thor. You never wanted me for anything more than my beauty. You never wanted me as a friend, nor as a companion. All you wanted was me in your bed, a perfect, kept pet that you could fuck in secret, use every night, and then never acknowledge in public.”

“I loved you,” Thor says, and his voice breaks on the words. “How can you have forgotten that, Loki? I worshiped you.”

“Not enough,” Loki snaps. “Not enough to save me, and not enough to die with me. You didn’t love me enough, Thor.”  
“I would have spent my life with you.”

“But not your life searching for me,” Loki snickers mirthlessly. “That’s the rub, isn’t it. You might have spent your life with whoever I was, but now, you’ll never come for me. I’m just some jotun runt, some embarrassment, some toy-turned-broken-boy, and why would you ever search for a toy, even a favorite one? You’re not coming for me, Thor. You won’t rescue me.”

“I wish…” Thor says. Whatever he says, though, is drowned out in the roar of a great metallic beast landing on the cliff behind them.  
As Loki watches, Thor’s figure grows transparent, then fades away, his words dying as his figure sinks back into the depths of Loki’s mind. Then, just as Thor has vanished from view completely, Loki feels the horrible vibrations in the rock that mean his tormentors have returned. 

It is no matter. Thor will be back tomorrow at sunrise, once again, and they can continue this inane conversation. For all Loki knows, they will continue it for eternity, or at least as long as some tiny spark of hope exists in his mind, some desperate belief that somewhere, far away, _Thor is coming to save him_.

***

“… _I’m not overly fond of what follows,_ ” Loki says, pressing himself back into his seat on the Midgarder’s ship. He’s been on this miserable planet for only a few days, ever since Thanos send him hurtling across the universe, the scepter clenched in his fist, with a promise that if Loki fails in his mission, there will be nowhere in the universe that Loki can hide. Loki believes it, just as he knows that if he fails he will find his tortures on that dying planet to be nothing compared to what he then endures. 

Thor has finally come for him. Not when he suffered in torment, not when he finally broke and screamed out all he knew about Asgard and the nine realms. No, not then. Thor has come for him when he is a threat again. 

It shouldn’t surprise Loki at this point. Nothing should surprise him, not after falling through time and space, to find himself across the galaxy from every person he’s ever known or cared about. But it does. Deep down, where he thought there was no feeling left, something breaks. The strike of lightning on the quinjet’s roof is the final blow to that one hope that kept him from breaking all those weeks as Thanos’s prisoner, that kept him from accepting his place as nothing more than a servant of the master once he finally broke. 

Thor has come for him, and it is not because he loves him. 

The metal man, Stark, opens the door to a solid wall of clouds. They boil like a pit of snakes, roiling and hissing as lightning strikes all around the ship. Then, with a clang loud enough that Loki feels it through the soles of his feel, Thor lands on the ramp leading into the ship. He blasts Stark backwards without a second though, grabbing Loki. 

For a single instant, he thinks Thor is about to kiss him. His hand cups the back of Loki’s neck as it has so many times before, his fingers squeezing tight and burying themselves in Loki’s hair. Thor leans in close, staring at him. Then, though, he leaps off the ship into the night, dragging Loki with him. 

Loki laughs as they fall through the air, Thor keeping them just afloat enough to slow their decent to a reasonable speed. He laughs, and laughs, and laughs, his head thrown back and his whole body shaking with the force of it. Thor does not look at him. 

They slam into the ground hard enough that the breath is knocked out of Loki, and he gasps as he struggles to right himself. Thor, of course, looks unharmed and as perfect as ever. Loki picks himself up gingerly from the ground. His last talk with the Other left his back aching with phantom pain, and Thor’s rough landing has done nothing to better the feeling. 

_“Where is the Tesseract?”_ Thor snarls. 

Loki laughs again. If anything could convince him of how little Thor cares for him, it is this. 

_“I missed you too, brother,”_ he chuckles. It is good to know that Thor cares nothing for him, that all his dreams were but the hallucinations of a tortured mind. 

“Do I look to be in a gaming mood?” Thor asks, his eyes flaming with unspent lightning. The storm rumbles about them in answer. Loki dusts himself off. Thor should be thanking him that he has given Thor a reason to return to Midgard, not ranting about some pretty toy of magic, no matter how powerful it is. Thor, though, seems to disagree. 

He reaches out for Loki, grabbing him again by the back of the neck. His hand is slick with rain, his fingers heavy as they cup around Loki’s throat. For a moment, he simply stares into Loki’s eyes. 

_“I thought you dead,”_ he rumbles in what passes for a whisper from Thor. 

_“Did you mourn?”_ Loki asks. Of course he did, but only as much as was fitting, and no more. 

Thor leans in, his thumb coming up to stroke across the line of Loki’s jaw. 

“I more than mourned for you, brother. I thought, at first, to throw myself after you, to fall into the abyss of space if only to find you once again in Valhalla. I spent days with Fandral or Sif outside my door; no one trusted me to be alone.”

Loki looks away, tearing himself from Thor’s grip. “You lie,” he hisses. “And you are no brother of mine, or didn’t the Allfather tell you the secret of our true parentage?”

“It matters not,” Thor growls, stalking after him. “We are brothers, you and I. We grew together as brothers, we learned the ways of the world together, dreamed of our lives together. We will always be brothers.”

“I never would have thought it,” Loki says, laughing wildly. “Thor Odinson, so desperate.” He steps close to Thor, running a finger across Thor’s chest, and then caressing Thor’s cheek with one sharp fingernail. “I never believed you so… nasty-minded, Thor.”

“What?” Thor says, his mouth gaping open like a fish. 

“I would have thought you happy. Better to fuck a jotun toy than a brother, is it not? But no… Thor Odinson doesn’t think so,” Loki whispers in his ear. 

Thor’s eyes flare, and nearby a tree bursts into flame, the casualty of a blast of wild lightning. Loki climbs to the head of the bluff, looking out. 

“I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. Now I see you have not. I have found true power, and been shown the tesseract.”

“Who showed you this? Who turned you into this vicious, biting thing, Loki? Who turned you against me?”

“You did, Thor. You left me there to die, and taught me your true nature.”

“You lie,” Thor bellows. 

“Do I?”

With a visible effort, Thor calms himself enough to step forward and catch Loki again in his arms. “You come home, Loki. Please, give up the tesseract and come home to me.”

“You should have found me sooner. I don’t have it.”

Thor steps back, his true purpose revealed in his frustration. He starts to speak, but then, in a whir of machinery, the metal man comes hurtling out of the sky. Loki smirks. Thor is always so predictable. 

He settles down to watch, ignoring the ache in his heart and the way all his sense seem to focus on the point Thor touched him last. His brother has not grown, and he was never coming to save Loki. He never cared, not truly. 

***

The midgarders’ cell was made for someone they wanted to contain, not someone they wanted to punish. It’s just as bare as their Director Fury suggested when he showed Loki his hand, but it’s comfortably warm, and there are no flashing lights or terrible, endless, cacophonous sounds. Loki settles himself down in the center of the room, crossing his legs and letting his hands rest lightly on his knees. 

It is quiet. 

The hum of the ship buzzes in the background, and the floor shudders softly underneath Loki, but they are soft, constant sounds. Loki lets his eyes slip closed, and the world vanishes around him. There is no strange transport across the galaxy, his mind warping and bringing him across the galaxy to stand in front of the Other. Instead, darkness presses against Loki’s eyes, surrounding him, threatening to swallow him up. Loki takes a deep breath. It would be so easy to give in, to fall asleep here and let the midgarders continue their plotting, let them find the tesseract. He slumps. It would be simple to just stay here, a prisoner, a failed conquer. 

“Loki?”

Thor’s voice breaks through the dark, and Loki’s eyes fly open. For a moment, he expects Thor to be right next to him, a pale, translucent ghost of a man, as he was for so many months of Loki’s imprisonment. Instead, though, he stands outside Loki’s cell, golden and strong, a mountain of a man seemingly carved from sunlight itself. 

“Thor,” Loki hisses, not bothering to rise. He has had endless conversations with Thor ever since he fell from the Bifrost. What good will another do, even if this Thor is flesh and blood, rather than the desperate creation of Loki’s mind?

“I don’t know where to begin,” Thor starts, coming close so he can press an upraised hand against the glass of Loki’s cell. Loki stares at him silently, his eyes fixed on the point where Thor’s hand makes the glass cloud over with its warmth. 

Back on the planet Thanos dumped him on, Thor had always been torturously hot. Loki had reached out for his shadow time and time again, and all he had found was the burning pain of rock and lava underneath his fingers as his hand passed through Thor and landed on the cliff face Loki was chained to. Now, Thor is still a burning brand in the dark, but this is the cold, white heat of lightning, not the flame of molten rock. 

“I didn’t know, brother,” Thor says, his voice low. “I didn’t know you were alive.”

“Of course not. I’m a jotun runt. How could I ever have survived that fall?” Loki asks, sneering. Thor purses his lips, his brows knitting together. 

“Heimdal could not see you. Not until a few weeks ago, when he found you with the Chitauri.”

“Could not, or would not? He and I have never been friends.”

Thor snarls, the hand on the glass clenching into a fist. He steps back from Loki’s cell, starting to pace. 

“Heimdal speaks true to me. He has ever done so. It is you who lie, Loki.”

Loki stands up, laughter bubbling just beneath his skin, and stopping only at his clenched teeth. He stalks towards Thor, letting Thor see his sunken eyes and gaunt cheeks up close. 

“I learned from the best. Odin is more a master of falsehood than even I anticipated.”

“Do not speak of our father that way.”

“Our father? How long will it take to get it through your thick head, Thor. We are not brothers, we never were.”

“We were more, Loki. We are more.”

“Have a care, Thor. Your new friends might hear you speak to me thus, and wonder at your loyalty.” Loki finally lets the laugh escape, pressing himself up against the glass, cocking his hip in a mockery of the way Thor always liked to see him. “Or perhaps you do not care. Perhaps you’ll do anything to get your slut back, so you can use me just as you want, just as you always have.”

Thor hisses, slamming his fist into the glass in front of Loki’s face so hard that Loki thinks it might shatter. It stays firm, though, and Thor follows it up with a snarl. 

“Shut up,” he hisses. “It was never like that, Loki.”

“Was it not? You were so quick to put me aside.”

“I thought you dead. You still have no idea how much I mourned for you.”

“Yet, as always, when you had the first chance, you abandoned me. Would you have ever stopped searching for me if I had been Fandral, or Volstagg, or Hogun? Would you have stayed on Asgard to mourn if it had been Sif, not even bothering to look for a body?” 

For the first time, Loki is grateful for all those endless days on Thanos’s prison planet. He does not cry, nor do tears even form at the corners of his eyes. He has been drained of them, as surely as he was drained of compassion and remorse, and love. He is nothing more than an empty husk, and even Thor cannot save him from that now. It is a blessing. 

“Loki…” Thor starts. 

“Go, Thor. Go and play with your tin soldiers, your Midgarder pets. Go, and leave me.” Loki turns away from him, settling back down onto the floor to meditate. He hears Thor’s fist slam into the glass one more time, softer now, and then the slow thud of Thor’s feet as Thor leaves. The tears still don’t come. 

***

Loki takes the handle of the tesseract across from Thor. His whole body aches from where the Hulk pounded him into the pavement, but aside from that there is nothing but numbness. He has been emptied of all feeling, drained of it as the portal across the galaxy closed and his best chance to fulfill Thanos’s wishes vanished too. There is nothing more left of him to break, nothing more left of him to care.

Thor aligns the handles of the tesseract. There’s a rush of sound and color, and the strange sensation of Loki’s stomach being turned inside out. Ice sheets about him, freezing his eyebrows and the tips of his hair. 

The ground reforms under his feet. He drops his side of the tesseract, going to one knee, panting. Across from him, Thor does the same, his huge palms pressing into Asgard’s green soil. Slowly, Loki comes to himself. They are surrounded by trees, in a large glade in a forest. 

“Where are we?” he hisses. 

“Outside the city,” Thor mutters. “Only about half a day’s walk.”

“Half a day’s walk!” Loki manages to exclaim through his muzzle. He tears at the thing, pulling it off in frustration. “Half a day’s walk!?” He says louder as it falls away. 

“I needed… Loki… I needed to talk to you without Father or Mother.”

“You… you needed to? Have you lost your mind, Thor?” 

“I don’t think so,” Thor smiles at him, the corners of his eyes crinkling up. “I have to explain.”

“What the fuck is there to explain, Thor? I tried to take over Midgard, I failed. You won. As always. What more is there?”

“Loki,” Thor breathes. “There is always more. We never finished talking on the Midgarders’ ship.”

“As I remember, we said quite enough,” Loki snarls. He turns away, but Thor’s hand snaps out and grabs his wrist bruisingly tight. 

“Maybe you did. But… I never apologized.” The words are strangled, but they catch against some rough place inside Loki that he though had vanished and pull him back to his brother. 

“You _what?_ ” he asks. 

“I never apologized, Loki. You were right.”

“Well that’s a first. Tell me, Thor, what have you finally realized I was right about?”

“I should have come for you, no matter what Heimdal said. I should have spent every moment of my life searching for you, even if I never found you.”

Loki laughs, dry and cracked, the sound just as it always was talking to Thor’s shade on that desert planet. “Finally realized that, have you. Yes, Thor, you should have. But you didn’t, and now I know the truth of your love.”

“Loki, please?”

“Please, Thor? _Please?_ Do you have any idea what that word means to me? Do you have any idea how many times I cried out for you as the Other tried some new torture on me, searching for something that would permanently mark a jotun seidrmadr? Do you have any idea how many days I screamed for you to rescue me and you never came. Don’t you dare ask me to forgive you. Don’t you dare say please to me.”

Loki is panting, his whole body shaking. The words spill out of his mouth like vomit, flooding across the empty space between him and Thor, tainting it with their bile. They are poison, just as is everything that ever escapes from between Loki’s lips. 

For a single instant, Thor stands stock still. Loki has never seen the look on his face before. His eyes are huge, glassy and wet, but no tears fall down his cheeks. He seems caught between rage and despair, poised on the edge of a deep precipice with nothing to catch his fall. 

“My love,” Thor whispers. It’s the first time Loki has heard him say that in years, since just before Thor’s botched coronation. For a moment, it seems that Thor doesn’t even realize he’s said it himself. Then he steps forward, reaching out for Loki. Loki bats his hand away. 

“Forget about it, Thor. Forget about it. You can never fix this. You can never fix me. Just throw me in jail and leave me there to rot away.”

“I…” 

“I said leave me be,” Loki screams, turning from Thor to hide his face. 

It doesn’t work, though. Thor’s arms twine around his waist and Thor’s lips press softly against Loki’s neck. Loki struggles, but he is too tired to do more than squirm in Thor’s grip. Thor lets him fight for a few seconds, though, before tightening his arms enough that Loki struggles are utterly futile. 

“I will never leave you be, Loki. Not again. You are my brother, and my greatest love. I will never forget that. Not again.”

“Don’t make a promise you can’t keep, Thor,” Loki says. He tastes salt on his lips as he bites one. All of an instant, he realizes that he is crying, sobbing even. His sides are shaking with it, and tears are pouring down his cheeks. They are the first tears he has truly shed in years.”

“Do you doubt me, now that I have sworn?” Thor asks. 

“Of course I do,” Loki answers, his voice breaking on the words. 

Thor spins Loki around so that they face one another, pressing his forehead to Loki’s and wrapping his arms tightly around Loki’s back. 

“What can I do to make you believe me?” He asks. 

“Nothing, Thor,” Loki sobs. “You can do nothing. You are nothing to me. Just a failed rescuer and a man who was never my brother.”

Thor seems about to say something. Then, though, he leans in. His lips press to Loki’s. He tastes of storm and of himself. Loki tries to remain impassive, but he cannot. He bites hard at Thor’s lower lip, sinking his teeth in. Thor groans, pulling Loki closer, so close that every molecule of space around Loki seems to be taken up with Thor - his smell, his touch, his taste. Loki whimpers. 

“You are something to me, though, Loki. Maybe you want to lie to yourself and say you do not care about me anymore. Who am I to deny you that? But I will prove myself to you. I will fix this.”

“You can’t,” Loki gasps. The calm has vanished from him, and there is nothing left but the aching shadow of his former self, all rough edges and broken, tortured places, every cell in him calling out for Thor. “I’m broken, and you have never been a smith.”

“Then I will learn, for you. You are mine, Loki, and I will never give you up again.”

Loki lets Thor kiss him. He lets Thor caress him, lick away his tears and hold him tight. He knows that Thor will never be able to put him back together again, not the way that Loki should be rebuilt. No one can. But here, in this glade in the woods, with Thor holding him more tenderly than Loki would have believed possible, Loki can’t remember any of the reasons not to let Thor try. 

It will never work, but Loki has nothing to lose by letting Thor live in hope of it. He relaxes into Thor’s arms, burying his face in Thor’s shoulder. Thor smells of leather and oil and home. Loki will never make the mistake of hoping again, but with Thor all around him, a little voice whispers deep in his mind that maybe he does not have to hope. Maybe, Thor can hope enough for both of them.

**Author's Note:**

> +OOOOOOOOPS I DID THE ANGST AGAIN. 
> 
> +I swear, it all works out, TDW never happens, and they figure things out. I SWEAR. 
> 
> +Come yell at me on tumblr at [saltandlimes](http://saltandlimes.tumblr.com/).


End file.
